In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  As always in authoritarian states of any colour, the past can serve to discredit the present. The mere narrative or re-enactment of history could be seen as subversive. Elizabeth was furious: believing Hayward’s offence to have been deliberate, she demanded he be tortured on the rack.

  The case had wider repercussions, too. In June 1599 the register of the Company of Stationers carried a note ‘That no English histories be printed except they be allowed by some of her Majesty’s privy Council’ and that ‘no plays be printed except they be allowed by such as have authority’. Any book of this nature was to be brought under the control of the archbishops of Canterbury and London and, ominously, ‘such books as can be found or are already taken let them be presently brought to the Bishop of London to be burnt’. Censorship and book burning were all part of the Elizabethan state.

  In this light it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare and his company were sympathetic to Essex, who we know had long loved the play’s ‘conceit’. At any rate, Richard II went ahead at the Globe on the afternoon of Saturday the 7th, with the deposition scene: Burbage presumably played Richard. The next day Essex and a group of armed followers tried to get the city to rise up, but to no avail. Essex was captured and his supporters, including the Earl of Southampton, were arrested.

  Shakespeare’s company were inevitably commanded to explain themselves. They sent one of their number, Augustine Philips, to speak on their behalf. The Public Record Office preserves the intelligence reports on Essex, interrogations of conspirators and verbatim transcripts of the trial. Among those papers is a fascinating document written on 18 February 1601, the day before the trial opened. Examined ‘upon his oath’ by Lord Chief Justice Popham and two other chief justices, his words recorded by the stenographer, Philips did his best:

  He sayeth that on Friday last, or Thursday, Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy and the Lord Montegle with some three more spake to some of the players in the presence of this examinant to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next, promising to give them forty shillings more than their ordinary to play it. Where this examinant and his friends were determined to have played some other play holding that play of King Richard to be so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no company [audience] at it. But at their request this examinant and his friends were content to play it the Saturday and had their 40 shillings more than the ordinary for it and so played it accordingly.

  The sheet is signed by Philips and his examiners. Probably Shakespeare and the rest of the company had instructed him to stick to the money story; as always with interrogators, one should offer only what is asked for.

  The trial was over quickly and Essex and Southampton sentenced to death. On 24 February, the night before Essex’s execution, Shakespeare’s company were summoned to perform before the queen. Was that deliberate on her part? Southampton’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment in the Tower, where he was memorialized, lank-haired and sheepish, in a wonderful painted portrait with a black cat. He had been lucky.

  ‘I AM RICHARD II’

  There is a fascinating tailpiece to this story, which links Elizabeth, Essex and Shakespeare’s Richard II. That same year, on 4 August, the old antiquarian William Lambarde came to the queen’s private chamber in east Greenwich to present her with his ‘pandecta of all her rolls, bundles, membranes and parcels’, a collection of historical documents retrieved from the Tower. What follows is Lambarde’s account of their conversation:

  Her Majesty fell upon the reign of King Richard II.

  Saying ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’

  LAMBARDE: Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a most unkind Gent, the most adorned creature that ever your Majesty made.

  HER MAJESTY: He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played forty times in open streets and houses.

  The exchange leaves one with sympathy for the queen, old and isolated, weighed down now by the burden of office, though still with her finger on the pulse of things: she knew how many times the show had been staged. Later in the conversation, still bothered by it, she came back to the theme: ‘then returning to Richard II. She demanded, ‘Whether I had seen any true picture, or lively representation of his countenance and person?’ As she perused the archive, Elizabeth’s last words were these: ‘In those days force and arms did prevail, but now the wit of the fox is every where on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found.’

  AN EXECUTION AT TYBURN

  On 27 February 1601, only two days after Essex’s death, another execution took place in London, but in very different circumstances. In a grey, overcast dawn with swirling snow a young Catholic widow, Anne Line, was dragged on a hurdle from Newgate to Tyburn with two priests, Mark Barkworth and Roger Fieldcock who were to die with her.

  Condemned as a traitor for having had a priest in her house blessing her candles, Anne Line had been married to Roger Line, from the Hampshire circle of the Southamptons. Her husband – ‘a good man and true’ – had died abroad six years earlier, still only in his twenties, exiled for his faith. The pair had lived a life of poverty and holiness, and at some point had sworn a vow of chastity in their marriage. Now painfully wasted – ‘almost as thin as the rope’, a witness remarked – Mrs Line had to be carried onto the gallows, where she gave away her last belongings and made a speech affirming her beliefs, despite being harangued by a Protestant divine who ‘many times urged her to convert from her professed faith’. Shivering in their shirts, Barkworth and Fieldcock sang a motet by William Byrd as she was hanged, before they themselves suffered the appalling fate of hanging, drawing and quartering. A grim scene, alleviated only by the extraordinary courage of the victims.

  Mrs Line was buried in a charnel pit by the scaffold but was exhumed that night by Catholic supporters, perhaps from the household of the Catholic Earl of Worcester, one of the Essex and Southampton circle and a friend of William Byrd, a Catholic who was head of the music of the queen’s chapel. She was reburied in a secret ceremony ‘with greater decorum’ (and with Byrd’s music?) some time after mid-March, though it is still not known where. But the tale does not end there.

  That summer a book appeared entitled Love’s Martyr, dedicated to Sir John Salusbury, a Welsh politician from a prominent North Welsh Catholic family linked by marriage to the Lancashire Stanleys. The main item in the book was an old poem by a Salusbury retainer, Robert Chester, ‘Allegorically shadowing the truth of Love in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle’, but it also included ‘some new compositions of severall moderne Writers … diverse Poeticall Essaies … Done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers.’ And it was indeed a glittering array, including Chapman, Marston, Ben Jonson – and Shakespeare. But Shakespeare’s contribution, though on the same theme, was sombre and mystical, and quite unlike anything else he wrote, though some have thought it the most beautiful short poem in English. It has no title, though we know it as The Phoenix and Turtle. It has spawned fantastic theories, including the identification of Elizabeth and Essex as the two birds! It is about a married couple who had been separated for many years – one had died long ago, the other recently in tragic circumstances. The verses are to be recited at a secret ‘session’: a ceremony of interment with a requiem mass conducted by a priest in ‘surplice white’ with ‘defunctive music’. The poem is shadowed with an ominous sense of the malign power of the state, the ‘tyrant’s wing’, and seems to hint at a mysterious melding of the personal and the political. At the end of the poem a threnos (a lament concluding a tragedy) strangely refers to the couple’s lack of children (‘twas not their infirmity, it was married chastity’).

  In the middle of the poem is a gorgeous meditation on the Platonic conception of love that reminds us of Keats (‘Two distincts, division none/Number there in love was slain’), and a strange pun that seems to point the reader to Anne and Roger Lin
e: ‘Distance but no space was seen/Twixt this turtle and his queen’. (In the 1571 English translation of Euclid – a book Shakespeare studied at grammar school – ‘distance and no space, length and no breadth’ is the definition of a line.)

  This exciting new discovery puts Shakespeare in close touch with a circle of people outside most people’s field of vision late in Elizabeth’s reign – and right outside our usual assumptions about his known network of contacts. A private commission, first done for those who reburied Mrs Line, then given to Chester for his volume Love’s Martyr, The Phoenix and Turtle may take us nearer to Shakespeare’s feelings about a real event of his time than anything else he wrote.

  THE WAR OF THE POETS: LAST PHASE

  The late spring or summer of 1601 saw the final phase of the War of the Poets play itself out in the edgy artistic climate after the demise of Essex. Marston had replied to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What You Will with his own What You Will, again for the Paul’s Children. Then Jonson put on his Poetaster with the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars. Poetaster is about ancient Romans, but it implicitly, and unwisely, contrasted Augustus’s wise rule, the age of poets such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid (all of whom are characters in the play), with an English state dominated by malice, intrigue and envy, in which the talented outsider is done down by envy. In his prologue Jonson, as always, can’t let go of his moralizing (or his wounded self-regard):

  know, tis a dangerous age,

  Wherein who writes had need present his scenes

  Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means

  Of base detractors and illiterate apes

  All of which, no doubt, was lapped up by the intelligentsia: the students and inns of court lawyers who crowded the galleries for the latest instalment of clever literary references, in-jokes and satirical defamations. Jonson was now a spectator sport all of his own, and the wits queued to see his ‘unwieldy galleon’ outsailed by the breezy sails of his detractors, lighter in the water and quicker on the turn. Topicality was the rage.

  But this was never Shakespeare’s forte (or his interest – it would probably have seemed a waste to him to devote a whole play to such controversies). For a reply his company employed the talented freelancer Thomas Dekker, who that autumn got back at Jonson with Satiromastix (‘The Chewer-up of the Satirists’), which was first played by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe. But by now Shakespeare himself was sufficiently interested in the controversy to be drawn into writing a lengthy satirical classical play: Troilus and Cressida.

  The new play seems to have been taken as another tilt at Jonson – some saw a burlesque of Jonson in the figure of Ajax. Shakespeare was now moving into Jonson’s territory, ancient Greece. Troilus and Cressida was a satire that attacked everything: a play with no moral centre, in which all are as crooked as each other. It is a long play and very learned – Chapman’s weighty Homer was obviously part of his reading. But the play’s registration was delayed and then subject to getting ‘sufficient authority’, which hints at licensing difficulties. It was eventually published as ‘played by Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe’, but then reprinted with those words removed and a new preface claiming, strangely, that there had been no stage performances. This suggests that, like Sejanus, the play had fallen foul of the authorities. Contemporary satirists had often made play with Essex as the English Achilles, and the statesman William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and his son Robert as the greybeards in the Greek camp. If the play was taken in that way by the authorities – had Shakespeare perhaps been ‘intending the application of it to this time’? – it is not surprising it was swiftly taken off.

  By then Shakespeare had Hamlet on at the Globe with the added passage about the great brouhaha over the children’s companies, the ‘little eyases’, wryly remarking that ‘the boys carry it off, even Hercules and his load’ (the image of Hercules carrying the globe was on the flag that flew above their own theatre). This effectively marked the end of the War of the Poets, if not of the creative disagreements and abrasive friendship of Shakespeare and Jonson. They resumed relations in 1609–10: Jonson still making jibes at Shakespeare, Shakespeare putting little in-jokes into his plays that only Jonson would have recognized.

  HAMLET: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN

  So changes in taste, writing and themes came about as a response partly to contemporary politics, partly to new challenges and styles, and partly to the sheer fizz of theatrical rivalry at a time when there were many good writers – some of them really good – and when the younger generation was bidding to outdo the old. Shakespeare, however, always kept ahead of his rivals; he was always somehow new and fresh. And now, typically, he pulled another rabbit out of the hat, by recasting the old revenge tragedy of the late 1580s in a new and thrilling guise.

  Hamlet was probably first staged in 1600, and the confusingly different texts – representing his first version, his revision and his abridgement of the revision, with references to the War of the Poets – were written between 1599 and 1601. As with most of his best plays he didn’t invent the main plot but took it from an old play, perhaps by Thomas Kyd, and on one level writing the show now was simply a clever commercial move, as revenge tragedy was enjoying a major revival. Perhaps, as with his reworking of the Queen’s Men’s plays, he was deliberately remaking a popular old play with one eye on the box office, just as Hollywood today will remake a hit of ten or fifteen years before. And when Shakespeare brought out a new show everyone else responded, in much the same way that a successful Hollywood remake will push other studios into action in the same genre. Marston immediately wrote Antonio’s Revenge; and late in 1601 Ben Jonson was paid by Henslowe’s company to update Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, one of the greatest hits of the previous fifteen years.

  Hamlet has got the lot: plot, action and speed; love, intrigue and murder. Shakespeare could have longueurs in his plays, but the most theatrical, like Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, have a fantastic energy and speed of plot that lead the audience irresistibly on. The tale is a simple one. Old Hamlet, king of Denmark, is mysteriously dead; his suave brother succeeds and marries his widow, young Hamlet’s mother. The time is out of joint: in the court there is debauchery and cynicism, in the world threats of war and revolution, in the heavens omens of destruction. In a scene of thrilling power and drama, old Hamlet’s ghost – who figured in the original play – tells his son that he has been murdered by his brother and that Hamlet must take revenge. From then on the show goes like a rocket to its final tragic but heroic end, especially in the revised version in which Shakespeare knocked out a few scenes and a couple of lesser soliloquies to keep things racing. (In its uncut length, at four and a half hours it was far too long for an Elizabethan audience used to ‘two hours traffic of the stage’ at the Globe.)

  In Hamlet, Shakespeare famously uses the soliloquy – the lone hero on stage talking to the audience – to get to his inner thoughts. And Hamlet’s language uncannily represents a mind in action: anxious, excited, ruminating, always on the move. This psychology, this portrayal of inwardness, was one of the concerns of late Elizabethan culture. In this, Shakespeare was influenced by the contemporary debate over the ‘humours’; but where in Jonson’s hands such ideas could become rather static and preachy, Shakespeare brilliantly worked them into the action.

  Hamlet is perhaps the most commented-upon work of art in existence. In its delineation of personality and its portrayal of inwardness modern critics have seen nothing less than ‘the invention of the human’. But on one level Hamlet is just a rattling good story. As in several other shows, Shakespeare uses the device of the play within the play – here both as a metaphor and with electrifying effect in the plot. There is, too, an eclectic plundering of religious themes of the age: Hamlet, for example, is a student at Wittenberg University, Luther’s alma mater, and Calvinist allusions have been detected in the play. But how quickly and easily Shakespeare slips into Catholic ideas of purgatory: a warning to those who pursue his inner beliefs
from his public art. Yet after the final curtain the ghost remains in the mind: remembrance; the world of the spirits. Whilst losing none of its theatricality, the revenge play has now cleverly shaded into a requiem for a lost spirit world. The pre-Reformation past is beginning to recede, and now Shakespeare can dramatize it, exorcizing the ghosts.

  They loved it: not only the groundlings but the university wits too. English actors were soon taking the show abroad to Danzig, Warsaw and many other places, and a German version of the play survives which was produced in his own lifetime. In 1607 it was even played on a ship off the shore of Africa to an audience that included local dignitaries (see here).

  DEATH AND REMEMBRANCE

  But in Shakespeare’s personal life that autumn there was sorrow. On 8 September 1601, just before Troilus and Cressida was staged and perhaps just before the adapted Hamlet came back at the Globe, John Shakespeare was buried in Stratford. A fathers death is important in a man’s life. It is inconceivable that William did not go back to Stratford – if not for the funeral, then surely to comfort his mother. It is, of course, dangerous to read autobiography into the plays. Hamlet’s father’s ghost was, after all, in the original play in the late 1580s. But the ghost’s fire-and-brimstone description of purgatory makes us pause for a moment, given the timing of the play in the autumn of his father’s death.

  The testament found in the eaves of the Henley Street house contained a solemn request to his family, and most of all to his eldest son, to perform the correct Catholic rites – to say masses and to pray for him in purgatory. But had William himself left all that behind? Was he now a patriotic, sceptical Englishman in the new Protestant age? One might guess that for him it was no longer a matter of consolation in religion. His mind was too open, his habit of empathy too deep-rooted, to side with one view any more. By now he understood the nature of the world and the human condition. In John Donne’s telling phrase, the coherence was gone, and in his next dramas, whether consciously or not, he would explore what that meant.